The epistolary novel is composed entirely of letters. It grew out of women’s need for creativity, out of their shaping of their experience in correspondence. Letters deal with significant incidents, with problems and possible resolutions, with responses and conflicts between personalities in ways that link them with the pattern-making and character analysis of fiction. Epistolary novels are among the first examples of the novel, the ‘new’ form.
Histories of literature generally state that Defoe and Richardson were the creators of the English novel, but over a century before them, two women, Aphra Behn and the Duchess of Newcastle, first realized the potential of unifying epistles with a semblance of narrative. In Sociable Letters (1664) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, offered a moral guide, often sought in letters by daughters ‘who are but branches which by marriage are broken off from the root’. Behn, the first professional woman playwright, was also a skilful poet. Her Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister was probably published as early as 1683. Based on a real scandal, the novel reflects a desire for news reports and contemporary sexual scandal in the traditional discourse of woman as victim of passion.
To Philander.
After I had dismissed my page this morning with my letter, I walked (filled with sad soft thoughts of my brother Philander) into the grove, and commanding Melinda to retire, who only attended me, I threw myself down on that bank of grass where we last disputed the dear, but fatal business of our souls: where our prints (that invited me) still remain on the pressed greens: there with ten thousand sighs, with remembrance of the tender minutes we passed then, I drew your last letter from my bosom, and often kissed, and often read it over; but oh! who can conceive my torment when I come to that fatal part of it, where you say you gave your hand to my sister? I found my soul agitated with a thousand different passions, but all insupportable, all mad and raving; sometimes I threw myself with fury on the ground, and pressed my panting heart to the earth; then rise in rage, and tear my heart, and hardly spare that face that taught you first to love; then fold my wretched arms to keep down rising sighs that almost rend my breast, I traverse swiftly the conscious grove; with my distracted show’ring eyes directed in vain to pitiless heaven, the lovely silent shade favouring my complaints, I cry aloud, Oh God! Philander’s married, the lovely charming thing for whom I languish is married! – That fatal word’s enough, I need not add to whom. Married is enough to make me curse my birth, my youth, my beauty, and my eyes that first betrayed me to the undoing object: curse on the charms you have flattered, for every fancied grace has helped my ruin on; now, like flowers that wither unseen and unpossessed in shades, they must die and be no more, they were to no end created, since Philander is married: married! Oh fate, oh hell, oh torture and confusion! Tell me not it is to my sister, that addition is needless and vain: to make me eternally wretched, there needs no more than that Philander is married! Than that the priest gave your hand away from me; to another, and not to me; tired out with life, I need no other pass-port than this repetition, Philander is married! ’Tis that alone is sufficient to lay in her cold tomb.
The wretched and despairing
Sylvia
Wednesday night,
Bellfont.
To Sylvia
Twice last night, oh unfaithful and unloving Sylvia! I sent the page to the old place for letters, but he returned the object of my rage, because without the least remembrance from my fickle maid: in this torment, unable to hide my disorder, I suffered myself to be laid in bed; where the restless torments of the night exceeded those of the day, and are not even by the languisher himself to be expressed; but the returning light brought a short slumber on its wings; which was interrupted by my atoning boy, who brought two letters from my adorable Sylvia: he waked me from dreams more agreeable than all my watchful hours could bring; for they are all tortured. —— And even the softest mixed with a thousand despairs, difficulties and disappointments, but these were all love, which gave a loose to joys undenied by honour! And this way, my charming Sylvia, you shall be mine, in spite of all the tyrannies of that cruel hinderer; honour appears not, my Sylvia, within the close-drawn curtains; in shades and gloomy light the phantom frights not, but when one beholds its blushes, when it is attended and adorned, and the sun sees its false beauties; in silent groves and grottoes, dark alcoves, and lonely recesses, all its formalities are laid aside; it was then and there methought my Sylvia yielded with a faint struggle and a soft resistance; I heard her broken sighs, her tender whispering voice, that trembling cried, – Oh! Can you be so cruel? – Have you the heart – will you undo a maid because she loves you? Oh!
Letters had the advantage of male acceptance, flexibility, and popularity. They could also incorporate travel reports, enabling the heroine to widen her narrative with tales of adventure in distant countries.
As Dale Spender has shown, in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, there were a fair number of women publishing successfully in the eighteenth century. It was Eliza Haywood who established the popularity of the epistolary novel, writing seventeen. She extended the structure while putting the heroine through a moral test. Her works can be seen as a document of the development of the genre, from Love in Excess to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). This latter novel was much admired by Fanny Burney, who said it inspired her delightful Evelina (1776). Evelina, still an under-rated work, exploits the supposed veracity of letters, with a girl’s fresh reactions to London society, while exploring women’s position in that culture.
Letters were acceptable in a protestant culture which advocated introspection and conscience-searching. Elizabeth S. Rowe was one of the authors whose work succeeded in being both religious and easy to read. Her Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729) is fiction based on sermons to young ladies; it was often recommended for their moral education. It is a worthy precursor of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. In 1773 the Monthly Review stated that fiction was almost entirely the domain of women. By then the novel was not only commenting on morals and offering guides to manners, but also offered entertainment to an increasing readership. The Austen family were ‘great novel readers and not ashamed of being so’. Indeed, Jane Austen’s first experiments with novel-writing, as a young adolescent, were epistolary: a charming, brief four-page novelette of letters from a young man who sees a pretty girl, asks for her hand in marriage, and gets it.
The nineteenth century gave enforced leisure to middle-class women, who enjoyed longer novels, to read to the family, or on their own. Only a few writers continued with the epistolary form, among them the Irish Lady Morgan (1776–1859), daughter of Owenson, an impoverished actor. To help feed the family she began writing when young. As her Poems by a Young Lady Between the Ages of 12 & 14 did not sell well she turned to the novel, gaining a reputation as a regional novelist with The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806). Like George Eliot she used the novel to present social issues, though her passionate defence of the Irish cause led to ostracism by some English aristocrats. She may be an inspiration for Thackery’s Vanity Fair. She was the first woman to be granted a literary pension – of £300 a year.
In the late twentieth century, after decades of neglect, we find four experimental novelists turning to epistles. Fay Weldon in Letters to Alice on Reading Jane Austen (1983) continues the potential to offer advice; Gillian Hanscombe’s Between Friends (1983) stresses the power of female directness; Alice Walker in The Colour Purple (1983) demonstrates the vigour of black women’s discourse by comparing the letters of two sisters; and Lee Smith, an oral historian, in Fair and Tender Ladies (1989) displays the strengths of hitherto despised working-class discourse, its directness, ability to analyse, and dramatize. Women’s letter-writing has shaped and re-envisioned female experience – and language.
Extracts from twentieth-century epistolary novels may be found in chapters one, two, four and six.